From the annals of either sloppy editing or improbable contortions comes this:

Looking up, she saw Srija whizzing past on the pillion of her boyfriend’s bike. Srija waved and Charu waved back. Yuk, she thought, the boyfriend actually sported a ponytail and a tattoo. But Srija seemed to love both, as she had had her arms quite closely wrapped around the boyfriend’s middle when she had taken the trouble to wave.

This raises the important question: how? I personally would find it impossible to wave if my arms were wrapped around anybody’s middle. Is this one of those 65 Positions Guaranteed to Drive Him Wild that Cosmopolitan teaches you? Or is something more unspeakably non-Euclidean at work? Has Srija passed through eldritch dimensions that have altered her very being? Did she wave with tentacles? Did it lead to Sri-king madness? Ia! Ia!

(Psst. The awful books podcast I’ve been promising on twitter for a while now is under way. Recording will happen on my vacation in Kodaikanal in a couple of weeks. The first episode should be out in September, unless I trip up very badly when it’s time to edit.)